quotations about New York
Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the fearful cry of a too-well-known voice finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island of un-reality.
ALBERT CAMUS
American Journals
New York is unfinished. But business goes on just the same. Business is continuous. Everything else in New York is subservient to business. If New York would only stop talking about its side shows, its buildings, its Broadway, its class, its style, its civic pride, and put a sign at every approach: BUSINESS GOING ON DURING ALTERATIONS, people would know what to expect and many outside visitors would be saved disappointment.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays
People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.
LINDSEY KELK
I Heart New York
My hair is always at its best in New York. I don't know what's in the water. It could be mousse.
ELLEN DEGENERES
TV Guide, November 21-27, 2005
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it -- once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
JOHN STEINBECK
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
New York is a woman, holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand, and strangling the earth with the other.
ALI AHMAD SAID
"The Funeral of New York"
To outsiders, it may seem that that fusion of souls called New Yorkers has arthritis in its middle finger from overuse. But it is merely people's way of greeting each other as they run around like ferrets on double espressos with little or no time to make illiterate requests upon the art of conversation.
BERT RANDOLPH SUGAR
introduction, The Ultimate Book of New York Lists
The power to run New York is ephemeral; the structure rests on unsure foundations. The ten men who run New York do not combine their power, the group changes, month to month and year to year.
EDWARD N. COSTIKYAN
"Who Runs New York?", New York Magazine, December 23, 1968
When its 100 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. When its 10 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. There are two million interesting people in New York. There are 78 in Los Angeles.
NEIL SIMON
Playboy, February 1979
Out of the night you burn, Manhattan,
In a vesture of gold--
Spun of innumerable arcs,
Flaring and multiplying--
Gold at the uttermost circles fading
Into the tenderest hint of jade,
Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues,
Robing the far-flung offices,
Scintillant-storied, forking flame,
Or soaring to luminous amethyst
Over the steeples aureoled.
LOLA RIDGE
"Manhattan"
In New York you've got to have all the luck.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
New York is not just about heterogeneity, a quality other metropolises share. Neither is New York's cultural claim to cosmopolitanism particularly unique at this time in history. Other world cities exhibit similar signs of cultural cosmopolitanism, with fragments of different world cultures constituting the visual fabrics of their urban facades. What is worth studying about New York is its rigorous, democratic machine of political cosmopolitan citizenship. Becoming a New Yorker is not just about the consumption of multicultural sensations in a globally mediated environment. It is more challengingly about a set of performative engagements that activate and promote mutual respect and coexistence within the finite spaces of the metropolis. This socially contestatory, culturally volatile, yet rational endeavor is ultimately a utopian undertaking in political citizenship.
MAY JOSEPH
Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination
I became disenchanted with New York when I realized that I felt as if I had accomplished something when I picked up the laundry and got the Times and a quart of milk. I spent a lot of time worrying about alternate-side parking. I lived on the fourth floor of a brownstone. If I had messed up and hadn't jockeyed my car to the right side of the street for the next day and somebody moved their car at four o'clock in the morning, it was an automatic response, in winter or summer, maybe I put my slippers on, but I would run down in my pajamas and get that place. All of a sudden I thought, This is absolutely ridiculous.
ANN BEATTIE
The Paris Review, spring 2011
Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer.
DONNA SUMMER
attributed, Rand Lindsly's Quotations
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
JOAN DIDION
"Xanadu", NY Daily Quote, August 8, 2010
The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. All dwellers in cities must dwell with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
E. B. WHITE
"Here Is New York", Holiday
New York--the Upper West Side more specifically--this was the city of my choosing. I went to college there, then graduate school, but was certainly not from there, never rooted, always transient. I finished school and stayed, still feeling as though I were on some kind of long-term student schedule, on an emotional visa that let me stay as long as I liked without ever becoming a resident. I carried a Tennessee driver's license for 10 years after I stopped living there and only gave it up when it was pickpocketed from my bag. In Manhattan, it didn't matter. I didn't need a license. I had no need for a car. You needed to rent a car only when you intended to leave the city, which I could go months without doing.
TOVA MIRVIS
"From Somewhere", Boston Globe Mazazine, September 28, 2013
New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves ... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
THOMAS WOLFE
The Web and the Rock
From my room, I could lie across my bed and watch the cars rush along Central Park West. In a hurry to get someplace. Everyone in New York is in a hurry. You see businessmen walking fast, their heads bowed, the cuffs of their pants flapping hard against their ankles. They don't look at anyone. Once I followed this man, walking so close behind him I could have been his daughter--but he never even looked over and noticed me. For two blocks I walked like that beside him. It made me sad for him--that he could walk through this world without looking left or right.
JACQUELINE WOODSON
If You Come Softly